[ih] Some Questions over IPv4 Ownership

[John Klensin]

On 10/14/10, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:

>...
> Seems like The Internet could make a similar evolutionary step if it was
> needed....or mandated by government or customer pressures, as happened
> to the Telephone networks.

We did make such a step.  It is called the DNS, which provides
identifiers that are very portable wrt the routing structure and IP
addresses.

The mistake here is not in asserting that IP addresses should be
portable but in assuming that the telephone number concept and the IP
address concept should map to each other because they are both
user-visible and mostly numeric.  The Internet analogy to a telephone
number is a domain name.

And, if you want someone to sell you a very portable address with
either your phone number of the set of digits you would like to think
of as any other sort of portable identifier, I'm sure you would have
no problem finding a domain administrator willing to do that.

   john